Andy Ihnatko - What lessons can we learn from the Kindle Fire?

First, that “The Love Guru” isn’t such a terrible movie after all. Oh, it’s bad. Absolutely. But nothing so bad as what I had been expecting after reading the…

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Andy Ihnatko| 14 Dec 11

First, that “The Love Guru” isn’t such a terrible movie after all. Oh, it’s bad. Absolutely. But nothing so bad as what I had been expecting after reading the aerobically-bad reviews that were published on the weekend of the film’s release. “Only my dog, who once ate a five-pound bag of flower and then spent the next several days passing a large block of paste through his system, can understand the intensity of pain that I went through during the 87 minute running time of this movie,” wrote the collective soul of public movie critics.

It’s an exceptionally-bad movie, sure. But I was expecting Category-5 (“Sex And The City 2”) bad. This was merely a Cat 3 (the recent Russell Brand remake of “Arthur”). I learned this because I impulsively rented this movie as a test of the device’s video playback quality; now I pass this wisdom on to you.

Lesson number two: the critics aren’t always right. Or at least it’s important to keep in mind that they can only write about the experience that they themselves had with the thing in question. The difference between a Roger Ebert and some dabbler with a Tumblr blog is that Ebert brings almost 50 years’ worth of experience when he sits down to write, and though he’s always upfront about his own reactions to the movie, he also tries to see the movie through the eyes of someone with different needs and expectations.

A lot of reviewers have dissed the Kindle Fire. It has some basic physical design flaws, such as a power/sleep button located at a spot where it’s easy to press by accident. The software needs tweaking as well. The UI needs to do a better job of communicating back to the user. You might think that you need to tap a button several times to get it to register; in fact, the button heard you the first time but it didn’t highlight so you’re left wondering.

But overall, I think it’s a spiffy device and exactly what the market needs. Instead of building a clone of the iPad and selling it for marginally less money (a strategy that every other tablet maker has been successfully failing with for the past year) Amazon chose to focus on the core features that resonate with the greatest number of consumers, and to deliver them in a device that the greatest number of people can afford. “The Fire isn’t nearly as fluid and responsive as the iPad” is a perfectly valid complaint; “But it’s more than just ‘good enough’ for what it’s meant to do, and it’s just 40% the cost of the iPad” is also a perfectly valid response.

Many of the (shall I delicately say) most enthusiastic takedowns of the Fire have come from Apple-centered blogs and news sites. That worries me a little. The Fire might illustrate another lesson: that as a species, the community of Apple users might be a bunch of pampered, coddled, butterfly-collecting wimps who don’t appreciate that sometimes -- sometimes — a user with lower expectations a user with lower standards. Sometimes, “practical, functional, and cheap” trumps “perfect at any price.”

Seriously. I can’t speak to the reviewer who reported that his Fire kept crashing incessantly (I had a pre-release device and it didn’t lock up once during four days of intense usage). But are we really going to complain that the page turns look boring and mechanical instead of delivering the full OpenGL shaded-and-translucent flourish of the opening credits of a classic Disney storybook movie? Are we to dismiss a product because of an occasional 1.5-second pause between tapping on an application icon and something happening? Or, rather, simply because this pause happens more often on the Fire than it happens on the iPad?

It’s important to note these bits where (metaphorically) the body panels don’t line up perfectly and the buttons for the heater should be more prominent on the dashboard. But it’s also important to acknowledge that when you buy an Apple product, the polish, elegance, and killer design comes at a thirty to forty percent markup. Not everybody has that kind of budget.

Nor that kind of interest. Just as importantly, for many users, and with a device like the iPad, that money is completely wasted. I have a couple of friends who own and appreciate fine watches. The level of engineering that goes into a true timepiece can be breathtaking, as can the price. I spent $150 for my current watch and even so, it seemed like an eye-popping amount; until then, I’d only owned $50 Casios and Timexes. But I certainly don’t think that these people are silly for spending many hundreds -- even thousands -- of dollars more for an elegantly-designed, meticulously-handmade timepiece compared to my Swiss Railway Watch.

The difference is that my friends look at their watches and see the engineering and the design. I look at my watch and I see the time. This defines the difference between the ideal iPad user and the ideal Fire user.

The advantages of an iPad over a Fire, or a MacBook Air over a netbook, are far from merely aesthetic and intellectual. Let’s appreciate and celebrate those differences but please, can we try hard not to become snobs, either?

The Fire also teaches us that Steve Jobs was wrong about two more things. He was wrong when he insisted that 7” tablets are fundamentally useless. The size of the screen inflicts limitations on how the device can be used and that’s true of both the iPad and the Fire. A 7” screen limits the Fire’s usability bandwidth to content consumption and a restricted subset of “real” computer tasks. The iPad’s 10” screen limits it to just those times and places when you can carry a bag around and where you’d feel comfortable using a large device. The iPad is no more suitable for reading a book on a subway than the Fire is for writing a whole bunch of long emails. Two different tablets, two different users, two very satisfied customers.

Jobs was also wrong about his famous maxim that “The side of a cabinet that faces the wall and which nobody ever sees has to be just as beautiful as the front.” No, it doesn’t. It has to be strong and tight enough to protect clothes from tiny interlopers and to add a bit of support to the frame, and it has to be made out of something durable so that if the owner is stupid and places the dresser in front of a heat exchanger, the back won’t warp or come apart.

Anything above that is just a bonus. If you’re trying to sell me a dresser that you’ve built and are pointing out that the back is made from two pieces of perfectly joined, bookmatched, and French-polished mahogany, I’ll admire the craftsmanship in an academic sense. But I’d resent the idea that I’d want to spend an extra $300 on a feature that will only ever be seen and appreciated by the designer and by the spiders who occasionally commute across my baseboards and walls. My perspective as a consumer is much more simple than my perspective as a tech pundir: if the a feature doesn’t materially makes the thing more useful to me, then it’s only a missed opportunity to knock down the price a little.

Oh, and: seriously, “Sex And The City 2” is possibly the worst movie ever made. I saw it on cable. By the end, I hated not only the movie, not only the basic concept of moviemaking, but the very idea of light being projected from a source to my eyeballs.